Brian May

(show)

Ending software patents in Australia

Canon camera manual. Video can only be used for personal and non-commercial use without a MPEG-4 license. I didn’t know about this before I
purchased the camera.

Patents are for the benefit of society. Give up freedoms for the good of society. Similar idea for road rules. Road rules promote safety.
Patents promote progress. Indendepdant invention not a defense.

Unfortunately we got patents wrong. Computer programs. Like to use same implementation to solve multiple problems. On other side, dish
brush is not suitable for washing bike, that is if you want to use it for washing dishes again.

Patents work well for other industries, they should work in computering. Unfortunately patents are used as weapons to prevent competition.
For both large competitors and small and medium businesses. Only defence is having a brief case full of patents to use against attacker.
Many smaller businesses cannot defend themselves.

People being able to restrict ideas in software is against principles of free and open source software.

What is our goal? What do we we want? How do we get there? Sending mixed messages. Tweaking patents won’t solve our problems. Write
software to get around these problems - we are already doing this. Write license text to make things harder for patent holders. Create
formats that can be used at alternatives to patent encumbered formats. Need to treat cause, not the symptoms. Need to abolish patents.
Apply patch to patch system to remove computational and information processing from patentable material.

We missed the 2009 review of patentable subject matter. We can still do something. Latter to abolish software patents. Was successful. 1000
people signed it.

We partitioned the government. BTS for Australian goverment is pen and paper. Must be in specific format.

Innovation patents are harmful too. For just the same reasons why normal patents are bad.

How are we doing so far? Amazing amount of support. Who wants to talk about patents? People do, and are quite passionate about it. Patents
have branding problem. How do we rebrand patents to make them seem useful? Changing logos, etc. We have a good start, with the media.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I don’t have anything against new zealanders.

Going to be some sort of back lash from large cooperations. Hasn’t happened yet.

Poor patent attourneys are going to be homeless. Will pass hat around, reintegrate them into society.

You’re part of this story.

Andrew Tridge: 2 key issues: independant invention, other implementation of algorithm. Problems with patents generally fall into these two
categories. Need to aim high and aim clear.

Patent attorneys can be put to work in FSF.

Patent isn’t a cost recovery system, it is suppose to be benefiting society. What is society benefiting from this? Not what are other
people benefiting from this? Only megacoperations benefit from patents by squashing out smaller competitors. Nobody reads patents to see if
somebody has already done required work. Even magacorperations find patents annoying, and need extra staff to keep track of them.

Patents seen as required for developments. What is return of patent? Used as a measure of innovation. Open source often not counted as
innovation because of lack of patents.